Hector

• 1. Introduction

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  Hector, prince of Troy, stands at the center of one of the oldest stories in Western literature. In Homer's Iliad, he leads the Trojan army against the besieging Greeks for ten years, kills more warriors than any man on his side, and dies at the hands of Achilles with his city's fate already sealed. But what makes Hector extraordinary is not simply what he does. It is who he is while he does it. He does not believe the war is just. He knows Troy will fall. He knows his wife and infant son face slavery or death. And yet he fights anyway. This documentary asks why, and what that choice reveals about one of mythology's most quietly devastating figures.

• 2. The Name and the Man

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  The name Héktōr comes from the Greek verb ékhein, meaning "to have" or "to hold." Depending on the reading, it can mean "holder" or "possessor," perhaps pointing to his status as the prince and heir of Priam and Hecuba. It can also be taken to mean "holding fast," which captures something of how he fought during the siege the Greeks called the Argive assault on Ilium. The name is old. A Linear B tablet from Mycenaean times records a servant named E-ko-to, the same name in an archaic script, suggesting it was in circulation long before Homer composed the Iliad.

  Scholar Moses I. Finley proposed that the Homeric Hector was partly drawn from an earlier Theban hero of the same name, which would explain something of the character's depth. Two ancient accounts describe him physically, and they do not quite agree. The sixth-century chronicler John Malalas described him as dark-skinned, tall, and powerfully built, with a speech defect and a squint. The account attributed to Dares Phrygius described a fair-skinned, curly-haired man with a slight lisp, swift movements, and eyes that blinked attractively. Homer himself described Hector's hair as "kuaneos," a Greek word meaning blue-black or dark.

  The contradictions across these portraits do not cancel each other out so much as they suggest how widely Hector was imagined and reimagined across centuries. What the sources agree on is the character Homer fixed: peace-loving, thoughtful, bold, a good son, husband, and father, and without darker motives.

• 3. The Weight of Duty

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  Hector is the first-born son of King Priam and heir to the throne of Troy. He marries Andromache, who bears him a son, Scamandrius, known to the people of Troy as Astyanax. He commands the Trojan army with subordinates including Polydamas and his brothers Deiphobus, Helenus, and Paris. It is Paris whose abduction of Helen started the war, and it is Paris whom Hector cannot forgive for hiding from combat with Menelaus while all of Troy pays the price.

  In the tenth year of the war, Hector watches Paris avoid a duel with Menelaus and scolds him directly: Paris has brought trouble on his entire country and now refuses to fight the man whose wife he took. The reproach works. Paris agrees to single combat with Menelaus, with Helen as the prize, but the duel ends without resolution when Aphrodite pulls Paris off the field.

  Before Hector returns to the fighting, Andromache meets him at the city gate, their son Astyanax in her arms. She pleads with him to stay. Hector tells her what he knows and cannot say differently: Troy is doomed, the house of Priam will fall, and she and their son face death or slavery in a foreign land. But he cannot refuse to fight. His sense of duty, his fear of being thought a coward, and his love of glory before his people will not allow it. When he lifts his gleaming bronze helmet, Astyanax cries out in fright. Hector takes the helmet off, holds his wife and son, and prays aloud to Zeus that his boy might grow to be more glorious in battle than his father. He then walks through the gate. Those inside the house begin to mourn before he has gone far, knowing he would not come back.

• 4. Glory and Its Costs

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  Early in the war, Hector kills the Greek champion Protesilaus in single combat. A prophecy had declared that the first Greek to touch Trojan soil would die. Odysseus avoided fate by landing on his own shield; Protesilaus stepped from his ship onto the ground and paid the price. Hector fulfilled the prophecy.

  His duel with Ajax reveals the ambiguity that scholars would later debate. Hector challenges the Greek host to single combat and nine heroes volunteer. Ajax wins the lottery. Hector cannot pierce Ajax's famous shield, but Ajax drives a spear through Hector's armor and draws blood before Apollo stops the fight at sunset. The two men exchange gifts: Hector gives Ajax his sword, and Ajax gives Hector his girdle. Both gifts will eventually be used against their new owners. Ajax will one day kill himself with Hector's sword. Achilles will thread that same girdle through slits in Hector's heels to drag his body behind a chariot.

  Hector smashes open a camp gate with a large stone, scales the Greek wall, and sets Protesilaus' ship alight, all while contending with Ajax, Diomedes, and Odysseus working to hold him back. He goes down once, hit by a stone thrown by Ajax, and Apollo has to revive him. Richmond Lattimore later wrote that Homer's pattern of diminishing Hector's battlefield achievements actually creates one of the poet's unintended triumphs, making readers sense that Hector was truly greater than any Achaean except Achilles himself.

• 5. Patroclus and the Point of No Return

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  Achilles had withdrawn from the war after a dispute with Agamemnon, and his absence cost the Greeks dearly. His closest companion, Patroclus, disguised himself in Achilles' armor and led the Myrmidons into battle to push the Trojans back. He routed the Trojan army before Hector, aided by Apollo and a warrior named Euphorbus, killed him. Standing over the body, Hector taunted: "Wretch! Achilleus, great as he was, could do nothing to help you."

  Patroclus, dying, foretold what would follow: Hector's own death was coming, at the hands of Achilles, the great son of Aiakos. Hector stripped Patroclus of Achilles' armor and sent it back to the city. When Glaucus accused him of cowardice for not challenging Ajax directly over the body, Hector put on the stolen armor himself. Homer notes that Zeus regarded this act as insolence from a man about to die, though it made Hector formidable for a little while longer.

  Hector also ignored the advice of Polydamas to pull the army back inside Troy's walls after Achilles rejoined the fighting. That decision cost many Trojans their lives, and Hector knew it. Scholar Steven Farron describes the contradiction at Hector's core: he is a peaceful, home-loving man forced by circumstance into the role of great hero and defender, but unable, despite desperate effort, to fulfill that role or live up to the expectations everyone, including himself, placed on him.

• 6. Three Circuits and One Final Stand

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  When Achilles returns to the field in full fury, the Trojans flee behind the city walls, all except Hector. His parents plead from the battlements for him to come inside. Hector refuses, but not out of certainty. He runs. Achilles chases him around the walls of Troy three times, with Apollo giving Hector just enough strength to stay ahead and Achilles cutting him off every time he nears a gate.

  Athena then deceives him. She takes the form of his brother Deiphobus and tells Hector they can face Achilles together. Believing he has an ally at his side, Hector stops and turns. He proposes that whichever man wins the duel should return the other's body for a proper burial. Achilles refuses in the words preserved in Book 22 of the Iliad: "...no love between us. No truce till the other falls and gluts with blood."

  Hector throws his spear; it strikes Achilles' shield without injury. He turns to call on Deiphobus for another spear and finds no one there. He understands at once what has happened. His final words, spoken to himself before charging, carry his full awareness of his fate: "Alas! the gods have lured me on to my destruction.... My doom has come upon me; let me not then die ingloriously and without a struggle, but let me first do some great thing that shall be told among men hereafter."

  Achilles aims for the collar bone, the one gap in the stolen armor of Achilles that Hector now wears. The wound is fatal but leaves Hector breath enough to speak. He begs for an honorable funeral. Achilles refuses again, promising that dogs and vultures will take his flesh. Hector dies foretelling that Paris and Apollo will kill Achilles at the Skaian gates.

• 7. Body, Ransom, and Grief

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  Achilles slits Hector's heels and threads Ajax's old girdle through the slits. He fastens the body to his chariot and drives it to the Greek camp while the Trojans watch from the walls. Andromache watches too. For twelve days, Achilles mistreats the corpse, dragging it around Patroclus' funeral pyre. Apollo and Aphrodite protect it from decomposition, dogs, and disfigurement.

  After twelve days, the gods can no longer watch. Iris and Thetis are sent as messengers. Thetis goes to Achilles and tells him to allow Priam to ransom the body. Priam goes to his strongroom and assembles the ransom himself: twelve fine robes, twelve white mantles, embroidered tunics, ten bars of yellow gold, a beautiful cup, and several cauldrons. He crosses enemy lines with Hermes casting a sleep-charm on anyone who might look at him, and enters Achilles' tent.

  Achilles is moved. He returns the body and promises a truce of twelve days for funeral rites. The last lines of the Iliad are Hector's funeral. Even Helen mourns him, because he had always protected her from the scorn of the Trojans and been kind to her without reservation. Homer's final epithet for the prince is "Breaker of Horses."

  In later tradition, the dead Hector appears in Virgil's Aeneid to Aeneas in a dream, urging him to flee Troy before it burns. The hero's influence passed far beyond the Iliad, through Dante's Inferno, where Hector dwells in Limbo among the virtuous non-Christians, and into a lost play by the fourth-century tragedian Astydamas, which Plutarch described as a masterpiece equal to the works of Aeschylus and Sophocles.

• 8. Tragic Design

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  Scholars have spent centuries trying to account for Hector's hold on readers. Richmond Lattimore put it plainly: Hector "is still the hero who forever captures the affection of the modern reader, far more strongly than his conqueror has ever done." Part of this is his family. His tenderness with Andromache and Astyanax at the city gate, his prayer to Zeus for his son's future glory, the household mourning before he has even reached the battlefield, all of this has no parallel in the Iliad's portrait of Achilles.

  Emily Wilson argues that Hector brings his death on himself through pursuit of martial glory, which is itself driven by what the Greeks called aidos, a dread of shame before his community. Rather than accept his wife's practical advice to defend Troy from behind the walls, he insists on the frontlines. Scholar James M. Redfield calls his fate "in some general sense fated and necessary" but also the direct consequence of his own choices. Redfield concludes it is not a flaw in Hector's character that kills him. It is his aidos, the same force that was the emotional foundation of virtue in Homeric culture. Hector is, in Redfield's phrase, "defeated by his own characteristic goodness."

  In William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, Hector's death marks the close of the play, his nobility held against the deceit and pride of the Greeks. In Roland's sword Durendal, celebrated in the early 12th-century Song of Roland, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso traces the blade back to Hector of Troy himself. Three thousand years after the Iliad, the prince who held fast remains the measure against which other warriors are judged.